Was the Four Corners documentary sponsored by Dr. M?

The Third Force

Malaysia’s fractured ex-premier Mahathir Mohammad desperately wants an episode of Four Corners aired by RTM, and for a reason – he may have sponsored the documentary.

Last week, ABC’s current affairs flagship accused Prime Minister (PM) Najib Razak of running a Mafia-styled administration to front criminal elements. A little over three weeks ago, they accused Malaysian authorities of gagging journalists to conceal these elements as a matter of policy. All the slander, all the coverage – yet, they got themselves cornered.

In an episode dedicated to turning pigs into flying machines, ABC reporter Linton Besser may have packed in a little too much propaganda and hardly any journalism. At first glance, everything seemed to be in proper order. Upon closer inspection, however, I couldn’t help but notice how Najib was deliberately cast under the grim spotlight of ABC’s news cameras.

Just look at the visuals – a public venue, the security detail, the crowd – it’s a wonder how everyone failed to notice Besser’s scant regard for etiquette when it came to Malaysian authorities. Last month, both Besser and ABC cameraman Louie Erogly were arrested for jostling through a police cordon that had been set around Najib, who was then inching his way towards the state Mosque in Kuching, Sarawak.

Everyone present knew it was an official event, and so did Besser. “But that would make for great political television,” Besser may have thought.

And it may have been the incentive that led Besser to trigger an alarm, which helps explain why the Australian duo made headway for Najib by challenging security protocol. Needless to say, officers from the security detail intervened to resist their advances, which made it a wrap – it was on camera, and Besser got just what he wanted – visuals befitting a documentary thriller.

Post-editing, Four Corners opened the episode with footage showing its crewmen being apprehended by Malaysian authorities. ABC presenter Sarah Furgason later claimed that the arrest was triggered by a question Besser had posed to the PM – “about the vast sums of money that was channelled into his private bank accounts.”

She was lying.

All it needed was for one to sit through several minutes of the show to see how many of the interviews were scripted, less the one Besser attempted with Najib – it was off-the-cuff. More to the point, every other session was closed door, excepting the one with Najib – it was public and at an official event. Clearly, they were out to demonise Najib.

As a matter of fact, Besser was seeking to spark a furore and may deliberately have sought arrest. Five minutes into the documentary, and attention was already drawn to the climate of fear that ABC intended Malaysians to believe was gripping the nation. Sarah’s newspeak thereafter drove the point home that Najib wasn’t just corrupt – he was a Mafia styled ruler.

According to her, the PM was braided in “a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal” that involved the flow of an earth-shattering sum of money into his personal bank account. But talking about a scandal that didn’t exist raised the question of whether ABC was being funded to run the gamut of conspiracy against Najib, the same way Wall Street journal (WSJ) and Sarawak Report (SR) were paid to attack the PM.

You read right.

Late in 2014, both Mahathir and his onetime trustee to the Finance Ministry, Daim Zainuddin, chaired a roundtable in London that was attended by some of the foremost capitalists in corporate Malaysia. The meeting settled on a RM2 billion ballpark figure, RM600 million of which was shelled out in world media coverage by a US based lobbyist and public relations group.

Interestingly, a portion of that fund was used to finance WSJ and Clare Rewcastle Brown of SR to fabricate stories around documents that had been leaked by officers from Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM). BNM’s governor, Zeti Akhtar Aziz, has remained silent over the issue, but is believed to be in the know and may even have conspired to leak forgeries to foreign persons.

Question is, did some of that fund end in ABC’s money pot?

The Monday episode by Four Corners was yet another tantalising twist in a spite-filled media campaign against Najib that seems to be fizzling out, now in a do-or-die phase. After having failed to get Najib arrested last July, Mahathir has set his sights on an arrest in the coming weeks by getting Zeti to publically charge the PM of malfeasance under banking laws. And Mahathir has his fingers crossed – and so does his son.

But Four Corners may have thwarted both Mahathir’s and Zeti’s ambition.

While every other analyst was abuzz with the fact that ABC had shot itself in its foot – which it did, by revealing that the much hyped RM2.6 billion in Najib’s account had originated from Saudi sources – nobody seemed to realise that the transfer was regulated by Saudi’s central bank – or the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA).

In addition to acting as the central bank of Saudi Arabia, SAMA strictly complies with anti-money laundering and counterterrorism laws, and as such, regulates and monitors the colossal flow of funds from companies, agencies and ministries in Saudi Arabia to foreign accounts.

Wouldn’t it be prudent to assume that SAMA had been in touch with BNM over the RM2.6 billion transaction? And assuming it was not – which is entirely possible, as in this case, it was a government to government affair, mediated by its leaders – wouldn’t Zeti, being the governor of BNM, have been kept in the loop?

Perhaps RTM should go ahead and air an edited version of the Four Corners episode, taking into account the content of this article.